Startup Weekend always sounds like mission impossible: you have 54 hours - from Friday night until Sunday night - to pitch, then build, then demo a product. But the intensity and creativity of the teams that come together for these events are impressive. Great ideas, great products, great teams, and yes despite the short duration, great startups are hatched there.

That's why it's pretty exciting to see the next San Francisco Startup Weekend turn its sights on the education technology industry.

The Founder Showcase is taking applications now for a chance to make your pitch onstage at its event, to be held June 15 in San Francisco. Any seed or early-stage company less than two years old and with less than $500,000 in funding is invited to apply.

It's free to enter the competition, and members of TheFunded vote to determine who they want to see onstage. The deadline for voting is May 13, so apply now.

StartMate, a new seed fund that has brought the Y Combinator-model of incubator program to Australia, has just graduated its first class of startups.

StartMate's three-month program offers mentorship and investment to five selected startups. The program culminates in a two-week trip to Silicon Valley, which the startups are now in the middle of. And like most incubators, StartMate culminates in a Demo Day, one in Sydney and one in Silicon Valley, where participants in the program get an opportunity to present in front of early stage investors.

Women 2.0 announced today that, thanks to its success, its Founder Labs pre-incubator program will become its own, separate organization. Moreover, the program will expand from its current San Francisco location to New York City, with the first East Coast program set to begin in May.

Founder Labs has been a core piece of the Women 2.0 mission: that is, to increase the number of female founders of tech startups. The pre-incubator program lets participants keep their day jobs, with its sessions held on nights and weekends. It's a fast-paced, five-week program, focused on building mobile apps, giving participants hands-on experience validating an idea, and working with others.

It's that time of year again, when college seniors start thinking about the next phase of their lives. In other words, that means it's time to start looking for a job, polishing up the resume, and hitting the campus career fairs.

As we've discussed here before in relations to internship programs, many campus events and recruitment efforts still cater primarily to large, established companies. This can make it challenging for startups looking to hire new talent and difficult for graduates hoping to find work opportunities at small or new companies.

The NYC Startup Job Fair - scheduled for the afternoon of April 8 - hopes to address this with an event expressly aimed at matching graduates with startups.

It's easy to be dismissive about something like Startup Bus, where teams of hackers build and launch their projects over the course of the bus ride to South by Southwest. There's only so much you can do, of course, in such a short period of time, thrown together with strangers and with limited resources. Add to it, in this case, you're then thrown, if you will, into the din and the buzz of SXSW where it's next to impossible to get your startup seen or heard.

But the group that came together to form Lemonade Stand have lived to tell the tale. After five days building their product as their bus made their way from New York to Austin, the group has a working prototype, an app in the Android Store, an API with outside developers, and interest from potential investors. That's a fairly big win.

The anticipation in the tech world is palpable, as SXSW Interactive kicks off at the end of the week. We expect to see lots of startups launch over the course of the event, and LaunchRock, the creator of viral launch pages for startups is putting the pieces in place to make its own, newly launched service even more useful.

We covered LaunchRock here last month, following the startup's creation over Philly Startup Weekend. LaunchRock makes it incredibly simple to get interested users signed up for your startup service or product, pre-launch. LaunchRock has added more features, including an embeddable widget and an API so that you can integrate the service into your current sign-up process.

March means March Madness, of course - the time of year when eyes turn to the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship, one of the most watched sports events of the year.

The startup accelerator TechStars is getting in on the action with its own "bracket-style" tournament to find the next big startup. It's picking 64 startups to face off in Startup Madness.

hackNY is a program that brings student hackers from universities around the country to New York City for paid summer internships. The hackNY Fellows are matched with startups in the city and participate in a 10-week program that includes mentoring and lectures by investors and entrepreneurs.

The program is co-organized by professor Evan Korth from NYU and Columbia University's Chris Wiggins, and this will be its second summer. This summer, in the words of hackNY, will be "twice as awesome" due to funding that will enable it to double the number of students it can accept.

The Founder Institute has joined forces with StartupDigest and Udemy to offer "Startup and Go," an onine course on the initial steps in building a technology company.

"Startup and Go" is a collection of talks by Mint.com's Aaron Patzer, Evernote CEO Phil Libin, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, the Founder Institute's Adeo Ressi, and others.